Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Americus I

by Don Paul, 2005-01-20

Loosely and musically--for we must both see and hear lyricism that has signs in it--semiotic lyricism--the form of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's latest, ambitious, and throw-in-banners-of--morning-headlines-from-the-1890s-onward-along-with whiffs-of-Bronxville-basepaths Big Poem about America unfolds. In part this book prompts pleased wonder.

How remarkable that someone 86, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's age now, can write with the vibrant detail and lilting flow of many passages in Americus I. How wonderful that he remains aroused enough to try this kind of epic--and remains untrammeled enough to freely digress within it. How valuable that we get to hear and see through a poet's raised perceptions ways of life that are long-gone or going fast. How good it is that Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still singing and still swinging to hit home-run?

Americus I spans the 20th-century from France's Dreyfus Trial (''
"J'Accuse!" Screams Emile Zola' ) through the first Kennedy
assassination and the mass coming of Hip. It's an autobiographical, historical, poetical and fundamentally spiritual survey. Like Whitman's 'Song ...' and Leaves ... and like many other precedents it cites (Pound's Cantos, Wolfe's novels, Olson's Maximus, Kerouac's Legend), Americus I wants to make sense of our United States 'America' at the same time as it presents and illuminates its wayfaring teller, its experience-celebrating I-voice, as everyday but mythic and emblematic character ('a wop and a yid in one/A kind of Don Quixote/ tilting at sawmills and ginmills/ A Euro man indeed/ ...').

The poem of 12 sections is for me most effective when it's detailing autobiographical experience or when it's lyrical to a songlike, abstract extreme . Its passages about boyhood stickball in Bronxville ('And the kids playing stickball/Their far cries echoing/ In this green meadow/ with its worn baseball diamond/with rocks for bases/ ...') and young-manhood command of a 'diesel-powered wooden-hulled subchaser' on the English Channel late in the night before D-Day ('And in the very first light on the western horizon astern, they were just beginning to see a forest of masts rising up, ... a huge armada of thousands of great ships and troop transports and escort vessels ...') are vivid. And its lines like song--combining personal romance with general history in poets' intrinsic tendency--embed in consciousness like the remembered waves of a Joycean dream: 'While we made love/Late that night/ In the fall of that year/ Among the yellow fallen leaves/ Under the linden trees/ In Boston Common/In the fall of that year/ Where now they are marching again/ Wearing colored rags of flags again/ ...'

The book's empathic sensitivity also stands out. L . F. (Americus)
registers as 'felt life' the trench-bound impasses of World War I, the first World War in which artillery shells decimated men and horses: 'Look look the horse has lost its head ... They keep coming and coming the brown troops the gray troops the black uniforms in steel helemets pointed helmets my god we're being run over ...'. He registers also the enduring hopefulness of our public's wishes just after World War II: 'There was still a garden/ in the memory of America/ .../ In the sound of a nightbird/ outside a Lowell window/ In the cry of black kids/ in tenement yards at night/ In the deep sound of woman murmuring/ a woman singing broken melody/in a shutted room/ in an wood house ...')

The book works much less well when it digresses from tactile experience into cultural survey. While sometimes clever, its notes on German Expressionists ('And Rottluff painted his rusty lust/ And Otto Mueller are cruellers as his paintings grew crueller'); and on New York Abstract Expressionists ('with their primal nonobjective images/ destroying the fine arts tradition/ of their Euro fathers'); and on Proust ('a whole belle universe where we did wander enchanted within a budding grove along Swann's Way to a Guermantes soiree'); and on Mannahatta's motley mix ('Irish micks and potato farmers/ dustbin pawnbrokers/midtown clothing-district rabbis/ ...' ); and on 'alienated generations' who 'lived out their expatriate visions/ here and everywhere'; and on the national totems fused into the mythic being of L. F./ Americus himself ('He the journeyman poet/ On the Open Road/ He Abe the Railsplitter/ And Ahab the Whaler/ And Sinbad the Sailer/ ... ) are notes that often run to superficiality and cliche. They're strangely disconnected. They lack exact, spiritual or physical sensation. Their palimpsest of selectively shared experience misses the 'felt life ', in short, that makes other passages in the book affecting.

Americus I (let's hope for a II and even a III) closes chronologically with the pall that followed the killing of JFK--that murder the trigger for violence which provoked hopeful rebellion later in the 1960s.

The book from its first section to its last poses choices for the
public here. What are we to have? What are we to make? Are we to make and have the embracing, egalitarian freedoms of Whitman and Chaplin that are beloved by L F? Or are we to have 'totalitarian plutocracy' under 'Bush League Presidencies'?

Will our every day's subliminal headline continue to be: 'OUTMODED CAPITALISM/ THREATENS HUMANITY/ WITH MULTIPLE PERILS'? Will our oil-based, air-conditioned, everything's-gonna-be-made-out-of-plastic America be Olson's 'foul country where/ human lives are so much trash'

Will we continue to look back on something largely like Langston
Hughes' 'past a mess of blood and sorrow'?

Or can our America yet be L F's assertion for it: 'the greatest
experiment on earth/ with the greatest chance to create/ a higher human being/.../ at home on the two continents of America/ made of many cultures and calamities'?

Can we like lightning yet leap forth? Can we let the world dance by joining its potential rather than destroying its potential?

Americus I closes finally with lyrical celebration through the verity of spontaneous writing. In it again L F sides with life. 'Yet still endless the splendid life of the world/ Endless its lovely living and breathing its lovely sentient beings seeing and hearing felling and thinking laughing and dancing ...', he writes. 'No end to the making of love to the sound of bedsprings creaking ... The waiting of lovers on station platforms the cawing of crows the myriad churning of crickets the running seas the crying waters rising and falling ... No end no end

to the withering of fur and fruit and flesh so passing fair and neon mermaids sing each to each somewhere ... For there are hopeful choices still to be chosen ... And there is no end no end to the doors of perception still be be opened and the jet streams of light in the upper air of the spirit of man the the outer space inside us/ Shining! Transcendent!/ ...'

"Bravo! Viva! Ride on!" So some young audience may respond to our good, gray, young-at-heart poet.